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Hampton, N.H. Area Genealogy

Welcome to the most comprehensive database for Hampton-area genealogy on the Web. This project is maintained by the Lane Memorial Library, the public library in the town of Hampton, New Hampshire. Our goal is to create a database of all of the people who have lived in Hampton prior to 1900, as well as some after that date.

In December of 2003 the database became a part of Rootsweb's huge WorldConnect project, which offers many more advanced ways of searching and displaying the information. In addition to pedigree charts, it will also display Ahnentafels and descendancy charts. It will even display more than 8300 descendants of the Rev. Stephen Bachiler, the founder of Hampton, if you have the time to wait for it all to download! Another helpful feature are the "post-it notes". Using this feature you can add additional information on any individual in the database, and even leave a note with your name and email address stating that you are interested in corresponding with others researching this particular line.

A Little History

This project began in January of 1997 and over the next six months volunteer Dick Marston, owner of " Marston's Manor " on the Web, put all of the genealogical information from volume 2 of Joseph Dow's History of Hampton onto the library's web site. (Some of the individual biographical details were left out.) The original book contains 463 pages and the completed Dow database contained nearly 14,000 names. The best part is that all of the families were linked by the intermarriages that took place between the many Hampton families over the course of 2 1/2 centuries.

Following this gargantuan task Dick moved on to include data from other sources, which not only added to the Dow data, but occasionally corrected it. Our first additional source was the data on Hampton families from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Noyes, Libby and Davis. This classic work has been in print since 1939 and provided many corrections and additions to the data in Dow. In early 2001 he began adding some data from The Great Migration series by Robert Charles Anderson and others. From both of these fine sources he has been adding data on families already in the database, whether or not they are from Hampton. New persons such as siblings, spouses and children have been added, and sometimes he was able to link previously unlinked parents and children, or unlinked spouses.

The database is expanding with information supplied by readers, as well as information gleaned from published family genealogies and journal articles. By adding data from journal articles we hope to bring more widespread attention to this oft-neglected yet invaluable genealogical source. All too often false genealogical information published in book form is corrected in journal articles, yet because few people see the articles the false data continues to spread throughout the genealogical community. A list of those journal articles we have used to date appear on our information page about sources . You will want to reference the original articles in all cases, because we add little more than the bare facts of names, dates and places, and the articles usually contain much more detail.

Our goal is to become the primary clearinghouse for information on Hampton genealogy -- a source every genealogist researching Hampton families MUST consult. There is a lot of misinformation out there already in published form, and we hope to be able to put much of that to rest. The World Wide Web is the perfect place to publish such information because it can be easily updated, and once mistakes are found, they can be eliminated forever from the database. This is not true in the print world, since errors, once published, are here to stay. It is for this reason that we will NOT share the GEDCOM file for this work with anyone, because we want to make sure that any errors we have created are not perpetuated after we have found and fixed them.

One Caveat: Joseph Dow, in his original History of Hampton genealogies, frequently did not mention WHERE certain births, marriages and deaths took place. When data was entered for this project a place was often included based on the assumption that the events took place in the town where the individuals resided. Further research has shown, however, that many of these events took place in neighboring towns. As we discover these discrepencies we will fix them, but be forewarned that some of the places that are given herein may be incorrect.

If you discover any errors in this database, please email us at genealogy(at)hampton.lib.nh.us. If you are interested in helping with our project in any way, please let us know .